News – October 2019

Beginning with the most recent new book releases, and October saw the publication of Esoteric Lacan, edited by Philipp Valentini and Mahdi Tourage. As the first in-depth exploration of occultism, Sufism and the Kabbalistic tradition, it examines how different religious discourses influenced Lacan’s work. Critically examining the European understanding of these texts, it seeks to use Lacan’s work to question how such readings are tied to the drive of capitalism and the “psychological internalisation of the history of colonialism”.

Barbara Cassin’s Jacques the Sophist: Lacan, Logos, and Psychoanalysis was released in October. Re-examining Lacan’s Seminar from the perspective of Ancient Greek philosophy, this new English translation of Cassin’s work presents Lacan as analyst who, “like the sophist, allows performance, signifier, and inconsistency to reshape truth”.

Among works newly-announced is an English translation of Silvia Lippi’s The Decision of Desire, due to be released in March by University of Minnesota books. Offering a re-examination of Lacan’s theory of desire that links it to masochism, mysticism, joy, death, and feminine jouissance, Lippi’s work combines Lacan with surrealist artists like Breton, writers such as Faulkner and Joyce, and philosophers Sartre, Levinas, and Spinoza.

Renata Salecl’s A Passion for Ignorance: What We Choose Not to Know and Why is newly-announced and due out June next year from Princeton University Press. Exploring our capacity to ignore what is inconvenient or traumatic against the backdrop of post-truth, postindustrial society, Salecl takes examples from genetics, forensic science, big data and the Incel movement to combine them with psychoanalytic theory to argue that ignorance has a positive side and can allow us to “reclaim the role of knowledge”.

The School of the Freudian Letter is organising a series of seminars in London on the weekend of 23rd and 24th November on Psychoanalytic Formation: What are We Aiming For and How Do We Practice. Several speakers will address the principles (not concepts) of psychoanalytic theory and practice in the Lacanian orientation, taking as the starting point the question Lacan asks in Seminar XI: ‘What is the analyst’s desire? What does it have to be in order to operate?’, and exploring his answer that “the analyst’s desire is not a pure desire… it is a desire to obtain absolute difference”.

The Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis will be hosting a public workshop in Sydney on 16th November exploring ‘Psychoanalysis, the Body and its Treatment’. Several speakers will address different aspects of this topic including in relation to trauma, sexuation, and psychosis. Abstracts of the talks and details of how to book are also available through the link above.

In Manchester, UK the North West Regional Psychotherapy Association will invite Jo Rostron to speak at the Manchester Institute for Psychotherapy on Friday 8th November on the topic ‘Bodies and Books: An Art Therapist’s Reading of Lacan’. It is the penultimate seminar of the year, which ends with Andrew Shepherd discussing ‘Behind Bars: therapeutic aspects of clinical work in prison settings’ on Fri 13th December.

In Edinburgh on 20th November, Lacan in Scotland is hosting a book launch for Professor Ian Parker’s latest work, Psychoanalysis, Clinic and Context, which was published by Routledge earlier this year. More details and a booking link via Eventbrite here.

Bice Benvenuto will be leading a workshop in London on Saturday 30th November on ‘The Unconscious Body’. Hosted by The SITE for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, it will explore Freud and Lacan’s conceptions of the body before turning to Dolto’s view of it as “a ‘sensing’ activity which gives ‘sense’ to both our psychic and symbolic world… and beyond”.

The second part of Amy Allen and Mari Ruti’s interview with Jordan Osserman on their new book, Critical Theory Between Klein and Lacan: A Dialogue is now available on the New Books in Psychoanalysis podcast. Part two goes deeper into the topics of the book, including Allen’s view of how intrapsychic versus intersubjective phenomena is conceived in Klein’s work, and Ruti’s distinction between circumstantial and constitutive trauma which she finds in Lacan. Catch up on part one of the interview here if you missed it in September.

For a limited time (only until 15th November), Stijn Vanheule and Dries Dulsster’s paper on Lacanian supervision, first published in the British Journal of Psychotherapy in January, can be downloaded for free through the Wiley Online Library. Check it out here.

Thanks to Adrian Martin for publishing a translation of Lacan’s review of Benoit Jacquot’s 1976 movie The Musician Killer (L’assassin musicien), which featured in a recent issue of the online journal ‘Screening the Past’. Jacquot’s name may already be familiar as the director of 1973’s Television, Lacan’s broadcast on Saturday evening French TV.

Lastly, for those interested in joining a cartel, the NLS has opened its registration for new cartels, whether working on the theme towards the next NLS Congress (‘Interpretation: From Truth to Event’) or a separate topic, which can be listed at the bottom of the form. It is possible to register 3, 4, or 5 members and the plus-one in addition.

LacanOnline.com is a site for exploring psychoanalysis through the work of Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst, 1901 - 1981.
Trained as a psychiatrist, he abandoned the profession in favour of psychoanalysis in the early thirties. After publishing his paper on the Mirror Stage in 1949, for which he is probably best known to the general public, in the early fifties Lacan embarked on a project he called the 'Return to Freud'.

Lacan began holding yearly seminars, starting in 1952, re-examining Freud's work. At the time, the theory and technique of psychoanalysis was facing a complete overhaul at the hands of post-Freudian psychoanalysts, many of whom had emigrated to the United States after the war. Lacan railed against their teaching of Freud, seeing it as an oversimplification of his work and a corruption of psychoanalytic technique reducing it to the status of life management. Through his seminars he offered another interpretation of Freud's work and psychoanalytic theory. Inventive, radical and adventurous, many still believe Lacan's to be a creative mis-reading of Freud.

However Lacan's seminars grew in popularity and as his teaching developed from a reading of Freud's text to an elaboration of his own concepts his teaching became more influential. Lacan continued to give yearly seminars until the year before his death in 1981. By that time, he had become a major intellectual figure in public life and had both created and disbanded his own school, separating his members both from the established psychoanalytic institutions and from each other.

Today, Lacanian theory is advanced by a number of disparate groupings of his followers and the technique of psychoanalysis he developed is practiced clinically by Lacanian analysts around the world.